TWO NEW, COMPLEMENTARY ESSAYS BY JACK GOODY together add up to an impressive call for a general reorientation of academic perspectives concerning the mythologies and hypocrisies of “the West”. In addition to a detailed survey of the recent literature on the topic, each volume is also full of entertaining digressions, some of a personal nature, which provide insight into the long-term intellectual agenda of a remarkable scholar. In the course of this review I shall draw attention to some of the most pertinent of his earlier publications, in which themes touched upon in these high-level syntheses are explored more fully.